Start-up generation
Co-founder of HealthApp
Jordi Cusidó is an industrial engineer and has a PhD in Electronics from the UPC (extraordinary PhD award in ICT for his thesis). He was a project manager at a technology center for eight years and did a postgraduate degree in start-up development at Stanford. In 2013, he struck out as an entrepreneur and has never looked back. In three years, he has founded four companies, raised more than €2.5 million and been recognized with international awards (MIT Technology Review and Most Innovative SME in EU). Now he wants to expand business into four new countries, starting with the United States...
HealthApp develops mobile health apps. Apps that connect patients and therapists, that collect essential data for patient monitoring and help ensure a better connection between visits. Jordi Cusidó is the co-founder (with Jordina Arcal) of this Catalan digital health start-up created in 2013 from a collaboration between entrepreneurs and CIMNE Tecnología, the incubator at the CIMNE research center focused on mobile health apps.
Cusidó explains that the company has developed apps for eating disorders that include gaming technology to make sure patients stick to their therapy and big data, data mining and artificial intelligence technology to predict crises and set off alarms. “All of the apps we’ve developed have been medically validated and we make sure they follow established clinical protocols,” he says.
I decided I wanted to become an entrepreneur while I was at Stanford. That’s where I realized that start-ups are a good model for transferring knowledge and research to market. After eight years at a technology center working on projects and trying to transfer technology through projects and patents, I was drawn to the challenge of working on a product, setting up a company and taking it to market. I can say that we’ve achieved all of our goals over these three years, having created, tested, launched, improved and sold our product.
The most important decision was to change my life. Getting out of my comfort zone meant leaving behind a steady, full-time job for all the risk involved in striking out on my own as an entrepreneur and working on more personal projects. Taking into account that I did this as a father of two young children, it was a decision that some in my immediate family found difficult to understand.
It’s difficult to choose just one piece of advice. However, one I use a lot is to not do business or make deals with people you don’t trust. This is something our lawyer said to me when we were preparing a project with 20 partners. The agreements were extremely complicated and we learned that it doesn’t make any sense to reach a complicated agreement if the problem lies in a lack of trust.
Another funny piece of advice from the same lawyer was “don’t make the problems of others your own.” This has been very useful in understanding when to be empathetic and when to be more distant. Sometimes, in order to keep the peace and help out, you try to solve problems that have nothing to do with you.
Right now, my goal is to consolidate the company and open up new international markets. Additionally, I’m working with some of my university classmates to document the process, the positive (and not so positive) experiences from the past three years –when we’ve learned a lot about entrepreneurialism– because we want to launch a series of publications for a PhD in Business Administration.
I would also like to mentor other entrepreneurs, especially those still studying at the university, to help them promote their technological business initiatives.
